In-Home-Switching for the Switch released – You can now stream your favourite PC games (and emulators) right to your Switch!
The Switch lets you take things from the small screen and transmit them to the big screen, albeit via the dock, but now, you can do the opposite. This is thanks to the release of In-Home-Switching, a PC game/emulator streaming solution similar to Moonlight!
What is In-Home-Switching?
Ever wanted to play Witcher 3 on your Switch? Well, now you can! (Image from README linked below)
In-Home-Switching, by jakibaki, who did some emulator porting to the Switch earlier this year, and D-VAmpire, is a PC screen streaming solution, similar to Moonlight.
This solution, which has been submitted as a contestant in GBATemp’s Homebrew Bounty, allows you to view your computer’s screen on your Switch via Wi-Fi. Unlike Moonlight, In-Home-Switching doesn’t use Nvidia’s GameStream protocol but uses the Windows Duplication API, simontime’s switch-usb-screen-stream-sharp project and ffmpeg to make streaming your screen possible.
As a direct a direct advantage of this, In-Home-Switching does not require you to have a GameStream-supported Nvidia GPU and can be used with AMD, Intel and unsupported Nvidia graphics processors!
What is its current state? What is planned for the future?
Right now, In-Home-Switching is still in WIP-state but the current release (version 0.1) has the following features implemented:
- 720p streaming with low delay and a framerate hovering between 40-60FPS over a LAN
- Input capturing works so you can control your PC through your Switch’s buttons
In-Home-Switching uses an API found in Windows 8 and newer so Windows 7 users may have to wait a bit longer. That being said, dual-booting isn’t hard to do! (Image from README linked below)
- This is done through emulating an XBOX controller (Windows and many games support this natively)
- The PC app offers picture quality adjustments so you can reduce how good the streamed image looks for better performance
From a user’s experience, it could be said that performance is quite solid with a user reporting good performance when playing emulated Dreamcast games like Crazy Taxi and others on YouTube showing games like GTA V run quite smoothly. However, some games may still lag but that may be due to a LAN that’s not fast enough or a computer that’s not high-powered enough so your mileage may vary. When it comes to input lag, it also seems pretty good but you may encounter minimal input lag (which isn’t surprising considering the nature of such things).
As mentioned above, In-Home-Switching is still a WIP solution (that evidently works pretty well) so there’s room for the new features. New features that jakibaki, its developer, is proposing include:
- Audio streaming support
- Currently, In-Home-Switching doesn’t do audio streaming but for now, you can work around that through a Bluetooth headset if you’re not too far away from your PC
Did you get tired of Mario Kart 8 and want to play some serious racing games on your Switch? If so, In-Home-Switching has got you covered and you can go race to your heart’s content with TrackMania, NFS and various other games! (Image from README linked below)
- Currently, In-Home-Switching doesn’t do audio streaming but for now, you can work around that through a Bluetooth headset if you’re not too far away from your PC
- Ability to disable Switch overclocking while using In-Home-Switching
- This is because the Switch’s CPU is overclocked to 1785MHz while using In-Home-Switching in order to decode incoming frames efficiently
- While there have been no reports that overclocking the Switch to 1.785GHz has done any damage, it’s recommended that you don’t use it in that mode for too long and if it starts getting hot, it’s recommended you stop overclocking and let the battery cool down. This is because heat leads to massive battery deterioration.
- Support for macOS and Linux
- GPU encoding on the PC, mouse support, multi-controller support and other features
- As this software uses the Windows Duplication API, which was introduced in Windows 8, it requires Windows 8 64-bit or newer. However, the fact that the program requires Windows 8+ is listed as a ‘current limitation’ so maybe support for Windows 7 will come in the future with macOS/Linux support.
For best performance, jakibaki recommends you lower your monitor’s resolution to 1280×720 (720p). Without saying, this streaming solution requires a somewhat powerful CPU and a fast LAN connection so don’t expect miracles if your computer isn’t up to scratch!
Conclusion
To start streaming your favourite PC games to your Switch, simply grab In-Home-Switching from the link below and install the NRO on your hacked Switch. Now, you should really go enjoy some great games like Persona 3-5; you can emulate P5 via RPCS3 quite well if you have powerful hardware!
In-Home-Switching GitHub README (contains lots of information): https://github.com/jakibaki/In-Home-Switching/blob/master/Readme.md
In-Home-Switching GitHub download page (you should check out the README before): https://github.com/jakibaki/In-Home-Switching/releases
What is happening!!!!!! This is really great!!!!!
If you went to a hardware store and bought a hammer and were told that you could only hammer nails with and nothing else then someone comes along and shows you all of the other uses of a hammer. That’s whats happening.
Huh
Dayyyy-um!! u r so right!
hammer the switch, best advice ever!
So i suppose i need a hacked Switch for that right???
Why not port Moonlight instead?
because moonlight need NVIDIA based GPU?
its not because of that, you can find the reason at the existing git of the project, dont be idi0t.
Another great article from our favorite trans.
ikr
Now this makes me want to finally get a Switch.
Awesome!!!
Honestly something like this deserves to be an official app in the eShop. You should ask Nintendo or try and contact them to get it up, might even get paid.